


The World Opened Wide

by just_another_classic



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-25 16:59:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16201790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/just_another_classic/pseuds/just_another_classic
Summary: Emma in the aftermath of Killian's death.





	The World Opened Wide

**Author's Note:**

> This is my very sad submission to CS Cocktoberfest. I apologize, because this is more sad than smut, but we all should have expected this from me.

_ ‘Maybe he’ll come today  _

_ Maybe he came already  _

_ And he’s sitting in the drawing room  _

_ And I simply forgot’ _

 

_ -"No One Else”  
Natasha, Pierre, and The Great Comet of 1812 _

 

* * *

 

  
  
This is how she remembers their first time:

Her fingers carded through his hair, his hand digging into her hip. Emma can still recall the puff of his breath against the slope of her neck, warm against her flushed skin. Everything about it was good, the way his fingers danced against her center, the thick drag of his cock when he finally enters her. They had moved slowly then, that first time.

Emma has never been one to make love. Not since Neal, not since she had been seventeen and believed in the magic of love -- before that faith had been crushed by destiny (by fear). Funny how Killian had been the one to reignite that faith. Funny that now he’s gone.

(Dead.)

(And she’s the one who killed him.)

 

-/-

 

She spins the ring gave her -- the one he said kept him alive (and now he’s not) -- round and round on her finger. Emma wonders if it might brand her skin if she does it enough, what it might mean to bear the mark on her left hand.

( _ “Calm down, Swan. I’m not proposing.” _

_ Oh, but what if he had? _ )

 

-/-

 

Her mother, having just placed Neal back into his bassinet, catches her one night sneaking back into the loft after a date with Killian. Emma blushes under her mother’s scrutinizing gaze as the green eyes she inherited fall first on the hickey, and then on the torn strap of her dress. 

(Killian had been particularly rough that night -- her back against the door to his bedroom at the inn, hook hold her arms against her head as he pistoned his hips into her.)

“Can we just pretend this didn’t happen, that we totally missed one another?” There’s something to be said about catching up on all of the parent-child milestones that the curse prevented them from sharing -- this is not one of them. 

“We can,” Snow replies, the shocked expression at Emma’s somewhat scandalous -- because how else could you describe being caught by your mother after a night of sex with your boyfriend? -- reappearance at the loft. Emma is momentarily surprised, half-expecting for this to become a  _ thing _ . 

( _ “So how was it? We want to hear everything about the date?” _

_ “Just for the record, some of us don’t want to hear everything.” _ )

Instead, she takes what she can get, moving quickly to the stairs. Her heels click loudly against the hardwood of the floor, the  _ tap-tap-tap _ reminding her that she’s not out of the woods yet.

“Emma?”

She pauses, hand on the guardrail. “Yeah?”

“You might want to cover up that hickey in the morning.” Emma winces, unable to meet her mother’s gaze. “Because while I might be fine with you sneaking in at all hours of the night, unmarried or no, your father most certainly will not be.”

“Is it too late to remind you that I’m thirty, therefore making me an adult who can make adult decisions?”

“Oh, honey, you will be old and gray and you’d still be our little girl.”

 

-/-

 

As perfect as the first time is, he apologizes in the aftermath. She’s confused at first, because she’d been more than satisfied. He had lived up to all of those innuendos.

( _ Oh, how she’d wondered before she finally opened up to him, turning his flirtatious statements over and over in her head and her fingers snuck underneath the cotton of her panties. _ )

“I shouldn’t have -- it was my intention before to finish...inside of you,” he explains, his ears turning red as he tumbles over the words. Killian Jones, everyone, finally at a loss for words.

It takes her one moment, then another, to finally understand his implication. Then, she laughs. That is the beginning of how she taught Captain Hook about the wonders of birth control in the Land Without Magic.

-/-

 

These are the moments when Emma Swan thinks about the possibility of having children with Killian Jones:

During her explanation about the various forms of birth control, and the thought is pushed to the forefront of her mind. 

When he holds baby Neal, bouncing and singing lullabies from a faraway land. ( _ “My mother used to sing to my brother and I.” _ )

The moment he tells her that she’s his happy ending, and the future is opened wide.

Holding the newspaper in her hand, ink circling around a home with more bedrooms than she knows what to do with.

Standing in the Underworld and seeing the scattered remains of her nursery in what should be their home, wondering what it could look like without cobwebs, shiny and new.

And now, laying on the sofa in her room, wondering what might have, could have, should have been and never will be.

 

-/-

 

She doesn’t sleep in the bedroom. Never has. (“ _ The Dark One doesn’t sleep, dearie.”)  _ She can’t bear to now, not when the bed is so large and the world feels so small. She had acquired the bed with the intention of sharing it with him -- sharing those lazy Sunday mornings all soft and bright to the nights where he would fuck her into the mattress until she forgets her name, and all the moments in between. 

The frame is iron, the headboard curved into elegant swirls. It’s poetic, really -- or it had been -- pretty and innocent on the outside, when her motivation for selecting that very frame focused on how very easily it would be to tie him up, how she could watch him writhe and gasp as her hips undulate over his own. 

( _ The darkness had been speaking then, whispering in her ear all the ways she could overpower him, own him, control him.)  _

Emma thinks that when she gathers the strength to confront her room -- “bedchamber,” Killian would call it -- that she’ll sell the bed. 

_ One bed frame. Never used.  _

 

-/-

 

The bed on the Jolly is uncomfortable. Hot, running water isn’t the only benefit to living in the Land Without Magic -- there’s memory foam, as well. Killian makes her forget the lumpiness of the ship’s mattress soon enough with his tongue on her clit and his hand marking bruises on the inside of her thigh. 

He’s in rare form tonight, the return of his beloved ship making him wild with enthusiasm. He’s already brought her to orgasm once with his fingers, her hands gripping tightly to the helm lest she’ll float away. 

“You’re happy,” she says in the aftermath, marveling at the wide smile on his face and the sparkle in his eyes. 

“Why wouldn’t I be? Everything I need is right here.”

 

-/-

 

If Emma is unable to step foot into her bedroom, she has no idea how she’ll bear to cross the gangplank onto the deck of the ship.

 

-/-

 

She falls asleep and it’s a fitful thing, her dreams more like memories. Killian, his fingers tangled through her hair. Killian, leading her in an intricate waltz while her father watches on. Killian, two-handed and draping his leather jacket over her shoulders. Killian, walking through the front door and kissing her on the forehead in greeting.

Only the last bit is not a memory, but a wish, and if life has taught Emma anything, it’s that wishes rarely do come true, and never in the way you want them to be. 

But, Emma is her mother’s daughter, and she can’t help but hope, can’t help but dream that maybe she’s mistaken.

Maybe she didn’t kill him.

Maybe she didn’t leave him behind in the depths of the Underworld.

Maybe she isn’t alone. 

( _ She did. She did. She is. _ )

  
( _ But not for long. _ )


End file.
